Brain-computer interfaces are coming: ‘Consensual telepathy,’ anyone?

There’s been a lot of hype coming out of Silicon Valley about technology that can meld the human brain with machines. But how will this help society, and which companies are leading the charge?

Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, made waves in March when he announced his latest venture, Neuralink, which would design what are called brain-computer interfaces. Initially, BCIs would be used for medical research, but the ultimate goal would be to prevent humans from becoming obsolete by enabling people to merge with artificial intelligence.

Musk is not the only one who’s trying to bring humans closer to machines. Here are five organizations working hard on hacking the brain.

Neuralink: According to Musk, the main barrier to human-machine co¬operation is communication bandwidth.

Because using a touch screen or a keyboard is a slow way to communicate with a computer, Musk’s new venture aims to create a “high-bandwidth” link between the brain and machines.

What that system would look like is not entirely clear. Words such as “neural lace” and “neural dust” have been bandied about, but all that has really been revealed is a business model. Neuralink has been registered as a medical research company, and Musk said the firm will produce a product to help people with severe brain injuries within four years.

This will lay the groundwork for developing BCIs for healthy people, enabling them to communicate by “consensual telepathy,” possibly within five years, Musk said. Some scientists, particularly those in neuroscience, are skeptical of Musk’s ambitious plans.

Facebook: Just a few weeks after Musk launched Neuralink, Facebook announced that it was working on a way to let people “type” by thought alone.

The goal is to build a device that would allow people to compose up to 100 words per minute, according to Regina Dugan, head of Facebook’s Building 8 research group.

Dugan also suggested that the device could work as a “brain mouse” for augmented reality, or AR, removing the need for hand movements to control cursors, the Verge reported.

Facebook has also been light on the details. The company has said it does not think implants are feasible in the long term, so it’s focusing on developing some kind of cap that could track brain activity noninvasively, probably by using optical imaging.

In the meantime, Facebook said that, within two years, it plans to create a prototype implant.

Kernel: Musk wasn’t the first wealthy entrepreneur to dive into the neurotechnology space. Last August, Bryan Johnson, founder of the online payments company Braintree, invested $100 million in a start-up called Kernel.

The company’s initial goal was to develop a chip that could record memories and redeliver them to the brain, based on research by Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.

Six months later, Berger and Braintree parted ways because of the long time required to realize Berger’s vision, reported MIT Technology Review, and the company is now focusing on technology similar to Neuralink.

Kernel plans to build a flexible platform for recording and stimulating neurons, with the goal of treating diseases such as depression and Alzheimer’s. But like Musk, Johnson is not afraid to discuss the prospect of using the technology to augment human abilities and merge with machines.

Emotiv: Unlike some other companies in this burgeoning industry, Emotiv actually makes products: electroencephalography headsets that record brain activity noninvasively.

The technology is of lower fidelity than the neural implants that companies such as Neuralink are considering, but it is more established. The company has a research-grade device, called EPOC+, which sells for $799. But it also produces a consumer-oriented headset, Insight, which retails for $299.

Emotiv produces software that allows users to visualize their brain activity in 3-D; measure their brain fitness; and even control drones, robots and video games, reported the Daily Dot. The company was selected to be part of the Disney Accelerator program in 2015, with the aim of creating a “wearable [device] for the brain.”

DARPA: The U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a $60 million program last year to develop an implantable neural interface in collaboration with a consortium of private companies.

The project, part of former president Barack Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, is ambitious. DARPA wants a device that can record 1 million neurons simultaneously and stimulate at least 100,000 neurons in the brain. DARPA also wants the device to be wireless, the size of a nickel and ready in four years, which is an incredibly aggressive deadline, according to MIT Technology Review.

Potential applications include compensating for sight or hearing problems (because the device could feed digital auditory or visual information directly into the brain). The exact technological approach is unclear at this stage, but the project has the heft of some major engineering giants, such as Qualcomm, behind it, Quartz reported.

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